What is cool to see here is the graph showing all of the games' scores broken down by category. You can see just how tight the competition to get into the top 5 is, and how every little bit of polish, every great sound, every wonderful graphic could be the thing that pushes you up in the ranks!

Quote:Originally posted by Camacho Ah, I see you have /2002/ up as well.

Cool.

Argo. scored higher than Kiki from last year in overall. I'll like to know if this year's entries had a higher polish than last year.

Gamep play score fro 2002 and 2003 were the same

Cheers,

In fact several games from this year scored higher than Kiki overall including Chopper, primate plunge, and Tower of Tears. Lightning's Shadow and Yoink we also close. Congratulations to these devs. I was shocked to see this! So many high quality games! (or voters stuffed full of sugar and morphine?)

[Mandatory Disclaimer from someone who took too many stats classes in college for business: Please note that this makes the assumption that scores across years can be compared. This is not necessarily true because different votes may have voted (with different preferences towards higher or lower scores) and the same voters may have changed their voting habits. Even so, it is interesting and does tell a good story when taken with a grain of salt]

Well, comparing 2003 to 2002, there has been improvement in every category, most notably in sound. A look at the numbers:

This makes sense because sound was the category that most obviously needed improvement, so many developers found people to make music for them, or they at least put some thought into the sound effects used.

Overall, scores improved 3% from an average of 14.2 to 14.56.

Now, this is all looking at averages. We can also see that the bar was raised in 2003 for the best overall games:

So is this 3% "inflation" a product of voters' changing voting patterns? I say no, it is a reflection of the overall increased quality of games this year over last, slight as it is. So good job everyone, not only this year, but last year too.

C) I got the absolute value of the difference of each category and the overall score.
Gameplay: 0.05
Graphics: 4.91
Sound: 7.92
Polish: 1.28
Originality: 4.36

These numbers are rather small and close together. What does this mean? It means that high ratings in any one category don't necessarily mean high ratings overall. There were theories that the polish category was just the sum of the other categories, thus it probably reflected the overall score the most. This appears to be untrue.

There are actual formulas for finding how closely two variables are related, but alas that knowledge slipped right out of my ears the minute my final final in stats ended.... It is probably something simple, too. Even then, you must remember that correlation doesn't necessary imply causation.

Maybe I should go to sleep so I can wake up and speak normal human english again :-)

That is the relationship between variables... If a higher polish always happened with a lower sound score, that would be a negative relationship. Here, however, are only positive relationships. This is as expected. The scale here is -1 to +1, with +1 meaning that every time one goes up a certain amount, the other goes up by a certain (different) amount [the values could be graphed on a straight line and every point would fall on the line].

NOTE!!! "A correlation between two variables does not necessarily mean that one variable causes another to change. It just means that as one variable changes the other changes also."

So even though the relationship between graphics and polish is 0.91, it could just mean that teams that are good at creating graphics are also good at polishing the game. BUT it COULD mean that voters are saying, "oh, this game has nice graphics, it is really polished". We may never know for sure :-)

As you can see, the strongest relationship is between graphics and polish. Sound also seems to be related fairly strongly to everything except originality, which is not strongly related to anything (relatively speaking). Polish was also strongly related to gameplay. Graphics and gameplay also were related.

Here are the relationships between each category and the overall score for the game:

Code:

Gameplay 0.923
Graphics 0.902
Original 0.637
Polish 0.960
Sound 0.928

The strongest relationship here is easily between polish and the overall score. In other words, increase your polish and you may end up with a higher overall score. (Or, it could be that polish means "good in every category" to voters, and that you can't do specific things to increase your polish score) This makes sense because polish was closely related to almost every category.

Interestingly, originality does not really influence the overall score nearly as much as any other category. So you can create a clone but do it REALLY well and still get a high overall score. I checked and for the top 5 games, originality made up only 15-19% of the overall score (it was 15% of argonaut). In "lower ranked" games, originality made up a much higher % of the score, as much as 30% of it (Pantheon).

So there you have some statistical analysis of 2003 from Alan. Have fun :-)